


all the time in the world

by the coffee cup (oakleaf)



Series: Fragments Universe [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Hayate centric, Non-graphic violence (implied), Not A Fix-It, Not Happy, as canon compliant as possible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 16:15:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1947744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oakleaf/pseuds/the%20coffee%20cup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is twelve and he is dying.</p>
<p>He is dying for another eleven years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the time in the world

i  
(This is how he will die.)  
It is cold and wet and miserable. He is a genin on the outskirts of Kirigakure with a comatose jounin-sensei and two teammates in body bags lying on the ground beside him.  
When the thick mist rolls in, he can barely summon up the energy to fight it. It would be so easy, so very easy to fall asleep and never get up again. But then there is the mission, the mission he must think of. There is Konoha and there is the information he must give to the Hokage (message paid for in blood twice over, and he’ll be damned if he fails his teammates this one last time) so stands up and he fights.  
He is just a genin but he has the capacity to become one of the best swordsmen Konoha will ever produce.  
He catches them by surprise, kills one and injures a second.  
And then he is coughing and coughing and coughing and he can’t stop, his hands pressed to his mouth trying to stifle the coughs to no avail. And he was crouched over, one hand instinctively straying to his stomach because it hurt so much. And the enemy was laughing and saying something about poisoned vapour and death death death.  
Then there was a black blur, slitting the throat of the gloating ninja and finishing off the one he only wounded. From his prone position on the floor, all that filled his vision was red: the red of his blood, the red of the enemies’ blood and the red of a sharingan.  
He slips into blissful unconsciousness where he dreams of pain and fear and everything is red. There is a small hand which runs through his hair cautiously, as if afraid of the contact.

He awakes surrounded by white. He tries to scramble out of bed, his only mission to go see the Hokage. He scarcely moves before he is coughing again and the blood that comes out is viscous and sanguine. It splatters against the white of the sheets, red on white on white on white.

(And there is his teammate, red blood splattered all over her white shirtfront and it’s her blood that is staining her shirt and she isn’t moving…  
…and he is awake and screaming and gasping and crying and shaking.  
He is a shinobi but he is still a child who has just seen his teammates – his friends – die.)

The nurses find him collapsed and unconscious on the floor, intertwined and entombed in the white hospital sheets, flecks of red all around him.

He is twelve and he is dying.  
(He is dying for another eleven years.)

ii  
 _This is the boy who brought the news from Kirigakure?_  
 _He insisted on seeing the Hokage before he would go to the hospital and gave his report while half delirious._  
 _Strong kid, that. What’s going to happen to him now all of his team is dead?_  
 _Inoichi Yamanaka has a team with only two genin, maybe that’s where they’ll put him._

The doctors babble on about something concerning overstimulation of auto-immune system and proliferation of infected cells that have breached the basal lamina within the respiratory tract and he understands that whatever it is that makes him cough is incurable. When he can stand and move without hacking up his lungs, they give him two discharge forms: one for the hospital and the other, the Shinobi Corps. He signs only the first the second form is never seen again.  
The doctor doesn’t even notice. No one really does.

He gets tired more easily than ever before but he pushes himself harder than ever before. If his physical strength will not reach that of his graduating class, he will throw himself into making up for it in other ways.  
His father’s sword beckons. He takes it with both hands and doesn’t let go.

He gets a new genin team.  
He hates them.

(He hates himself more.)

The Kyuubi attack of not two years prior has left him the last of an already-dwindling clan, decimated by the Third Shinobi World War. There is little for him in Konohagakure except the gravestones of the dead and a pledge to the living.  
With nothing to connect him to his classmates, he drifts apart and throws himself into missions.  
To serve. To protect.  
Duty. Obligation.  
Pride.  
Others whisper about his debilitating cough, his sickness. Even before the mission that went wrong he hadn’t been a particularly healthy child, with perpetual bags under his eyes. Coughing up his lungs has made him only a shade paler and the bags under his eyes a little more pronounced.  
He is thirteen when he is promoted to chuunin and there is no-one to congratulate him.

iii  
He is fourteen and he still dreams of red.  
Others talk about growing up and he wonders when he stopped being a child.  
Others talk about the future and he wonders when he’ll finally get around to dying.  
He has perfected many things over the years and downing his medication is only one of them. His sickness comes and goes. There are times when it gets better and then there are the times when he can scarcely get out of bed. They say the only one that could cure him is the legendary medic, Tsunade-sama, but she wouldn’t come back to Konohagakure for the sake of a nameless shinobi.  
He doesn’t blame her.  
He continues to live. He sleeps and dreams of red and wakes up and goes about his day and sleeps and dreams of red.  
When he has time, he continues to dance under the moonlight.

iv  
He likes to pride himself on his observation skills, and when he is paired with the child prodigy Itachi Uchiha on a mission it isn’t hard to piece together which Uchiha it was that once saved him.  
When Itachi Uchiha comes down one morning, it is to Hayate witting at a table with two identical white pill bottles before him. Itachi gives Hayate a haggard expression and a facsimile of a smile.  
He also stifles a cough.  
Hayate walks out of the room. He defends Itachi Uchiha the next time he hears another shinobi call Itachi a ‘creepy stuck-up Uchiha’.  
It has the unintended side-effect of making him his first more-than-passing acquaintance in a very (too) long time, Shisui Uchiha.  
Shisui Uchiha is a genius and the polar opposite of Itachi Uchiha. Where Itachi is reserved Shisui is outgoing; where Itachi’s body is a study in slick efficiency, Shisui has muscles to show for all his continuous practice. To Hayate, they are a study in contrasts, the two paragons of perfect shinobi.  
Shisui has already made a name for himself due to his expertise at the body flicker and Itachi is the renowned prodigy of the Uchiha clan. Despite their fame and infamy, Hayate finds within them people he is glad to call his friends.  
He is grateful for them and the place they create for him. For the first time in a long time, his home consists more than some photographs, a few fading memories and the memorials to those he once knew.

v  
The Hokage entrusts him with his first solo mission when he is sixteen. It doesn’t take long for him to realise it is a suicide mission.  
He is to rescue one of his former genin teammates, Ibiki Morino, who was being held in a secure compound. His mission was to go retrieve his fellow Konohagakure shinobi and destroy the base. The co-ordinates of the base were given to him; all he had to do was attack.  
He gets there and he fights. He has practiced hard with his sword for three years now, and under the watchful gaze of a waxing moon he executes his first Dance of the Crescent Moon.  
His sickness is still there, hovering under his skin, but for the first time in a long time he feels alive. There is blood and for once it isn’t his. He feels the thrum of excitement that comes from living on adrenaline and there is a rush of power as he finds within himself the capacity for death and destruction. His rage is cold and impartial, like the distant moon which watches as he carves a bloody crescent into the compound.  
He saves his teammate, who bears the scars of torture both physically and mentally. But Ibiki Morino is alive. He wonders if this counts as some sort of atonement for all those he could not save.  
He comes back alive, and the Hokage looks at him for the first time and sees beyond his chronic cough and deathly sickness to see the shadow of the shinobi he can become.

vi  
He spends his nights under the moon and becomes intimately acquainted with the way the moonlight falls and shadows form. He closes his eyes and listens to the ever-present faint rumblings of the ever-moving shinobi village he belongs to.  
He practices and he bleeds and he coughs.  
There are the missions, steadily increasing in difficulty. There are friends who he can share companionable silences with. There is the challenge of perfecting his skills.  
His sword comes everywhere with him, an extension of his self, until it becomes his self. He is the sword, whip-thin but tempered through fire and unyielding in nature, deadly sharpness kept hidden. He is a tool but so much more. He is pain and destruction, hope and protection.  
As the light of the moon dances across the panes of his face, he is strong and he is free.  
He laughs in the cool night air and when day comes he basks in the warmth of the sun.  
He stops dying and he starts living again.

vii  
He goes for tokubetsu jounin. He passes.  
They praise his skill with the sword and he nods his head.  
They don’t understand.

Ibiki gives him an expression which is the closest to a smile he has ever seen on Ibiki’s face.  
There is a peacefulness which settles into his bones. While he will never be able to replace all that he has lost (and he doesn’t want to, never wants to do that with a fierceness that surprises him) he thinks maybe he can start to bring his life out of the twilight zone he has existed in for so long.

He acquaints himself with his fellow shinobi and gradually makes friends with several of them. They look at him and see themselves; everyone, once they get this far, has their own share of scars and sicknesses.  
No-one comments on his cough because they all know that a person’s physical state counts nothing for whatever is contained within. He distinguishes himself with his calm demeanour and they respect him.  
He takes to hanging out with his fellow tokubetsu jounin. They have semi-regular meet-ups and there are people that notice his absence. Ibiki Morino, Genma Shiranui, Raidou Namiashi; they all become what he calls friends.  
He belongs and he is content. It’s more than he ever imagined for himself.

viii  
As the year goes on he sees less and less of Itachi-and-Shisui, partly because of his increased mission load and partly because they always seem to be busy with something. He hangs out with the other tokubetsu jounin even more, and somehow becomes the target of their mother-henning and their designated sober companion.  
He gets stuck extracting his various friends (and isn’t that a little weird) from whatever strange and stupid situations they manage to get themselves into while drunk.  
Then he gets a mission with Itachi Uchiha.  
Itachi is still as reserved as he remembers, possibly more so. Hayate notices but doesn’t say a word.  
The mission goes smoothly but they meander around before returning to Konohagakure. Something weighs heavily on Itachi’s mind and Hayate doesn’t know if he should intervene. He sees Itachi up and walking several nights in a row, and when he finally succumbs to sleep (for the first time in their so far nine day long mission) it is fitful. When Hayate tries to wake Itachi from his nightmares he is treated to a kunai coming perilously close to his heart (his reflexes just fast enough to deflect) and spinning red sharingan.  
He takes Itachi outside and they spar until Itachi finally collapses from exhaustion. Hayate finally manages to haul Itachi back to bed, stopping to cough every now and then, and stays by Itachi’s side for the rest of the night, gently carding his hand through Itachi’s hair as Itachi had once done for him.  
For two shinobi long since slated for death, dying seems to be a long process.  
He returns to Konohagakure with grave misgivings and bids goodbye to Itachi.  
He never sees Itachi again.  
Within a fortnight Shisui is dead (suicide, they say, but the Shisui that Hayate knew would never have done that) and Itachi is nowhere to be seen, before all of a sudden the Uchiha clan is dead – massacred, by Itachi’s hand – and Itachi is a S-Class missing nin.  
He doesn’t understand and isn’t sure if he wants to.  
The other shinobi whisper about how creepy Itachi, the Uchiha prodigy, had always been; how the mental strain of being a killer at such a young age must have made him mentally unstable. No-one talks about how good Itachi had once been and no-one seems to notice that Hayate had once been more than passing acquaintances with Itachi.  
Hayate comes up with multitudes of theories concerning the massacre – because that was not the Itachi he knew and he’d be damned if all the rumours were true – and finally he requests a meeting with the Hokage. When all his inquiries are rebuffed, he has never felt so lost and alone. Time passes almost as if in a haze, days and nights blurring together. He remembers waking up in Genma’s arms once, and falling asleep watched over by Ibiki.  
He cries, once, and then buries the memories in his heart, locking away the companionship and laughter they had once shared. Shisui is dead, and Itachi is as good as dead.

The frown he wears becomes a little more etched into his face and his increased ferocity – if even noticed – is unremarked upon.

ix  
He becomes Uzuki Yuugao’s sword instructor when he is twenty and she is nineteen. She is angling to join the ANBU and he just wants to forget.  
They don’t fall in love. They just are.  
This is the first time for both of them and they stumble into it with eyes wide open and hearts shuttered closed. They find a reason to open their hearts and close their eyes and just trust one another.  
Under his tutelage, her skill with the sword increases. Under her care, the bleakness which he carries around is lightened.  
It just seems to happen and everyone seems a little surprised. They move in together and their lives begin to merge. People begin to notice when they turn up to meetings together, always together. There are those that whisper and those that congratulate them. Genma comes up to him one day and congratulates him and Hayate quietly thanks him, a ghost of a smile on his face.  
Soon they forget what it means to live apart.  
She passes the ANBU exam with flying colours and they go out for dinner. Afterwards they take a walk under the moonlight and they talk about death.  
He has long since accepted that his death is on the horizon and she is about to join the department with the highest chance of death. They are shinobi through and through – it’s the integral cornerstone of both their identities - and they love the way shinobi do, under the constant spectre of death and separation.  
And as much as they love each other, they have other commitments like duty and obligation.  
Neither can give up that for anything.  
So they don’t promise ‘forever’ or whatever else other people promise, merely to love fiercely and without regrets.

"Then let's make a promise! With the moon as our witness… I swear to you and you swear to me… That we will love each other above all else, and protect each other."

(Even in death he keeps his vow.)

He visits Shisui’s grave and places carnations. He does the same for his parents, his teammates and the dead that he knows.  
He readily admits to Yuugao that these are people he once cared about and now all he has to care for is her.  
They are shinobi and in love. Their love isn’t transcendent, but it’s something worth fighting for in their worlds of death and destruction.

x  
Even in love, the world isn’t magically transformed. He gets a painful reminder when his sickness returns with a vengeance, resulting in him being taken off missions for nearly a month. Each breath is laborious and rattles in his chest. He becomes painfully thin, all awkward jutting bones and listlessness. He can barely take two steps without having to stop and cough. Food he eats comes back up more often than not.  
The doctors tell him he will never fight again and will most likely die within a few months.  
He gets better anyway.  
The coughing subsides, so he no longer retches up bloody bits of his lungs every few minutes. Despite the risk of aggravating his sickness, he throws himself into his training in desperation, trying to regain the skills that have diminished during his hiatus. He cannot stand the thought of having to retire.  
Yuugao stays by his side, gazing at him without blind adoration but with stark regard. They have seen each other at their worst and nothing will come between them. She doesn’t even try to stop him but hugs him tighter instead.  
He will never be as good as he once was, but he can still fight.  
The Hokage seems reluctant to send him on missions again, but he insists. He goes and comes back with more injuries than he has sustained for a long time, but still alive.  
He catches up with his fellow tokubetsu jounin and they tell him he looks like hell.  
He tells them that at least he isn’t in hell yet.

xi  
The upcoming graduation of Sasuke Uchiha is a sudden reminder of all that he had once tried to forget. He finds it is a lot easier to look back now.  
He applies to be Sasuke’s sensei in honour of the life debt he still owes Itachi Uchiha. If there was one thing about the Itachi he knew, it was the fierce protectiveness he held towards his younger brother. It’s the least he can do.  
His application is rebuffed in favour of Kakashi Hatake.  
He hopes the Hokage knows what he is doing.

xii  
He proposes to Yuugao.  
“I can’t promise you forever but I promise you the rest of my life,” he tells her.  
She says yes.

The Hokage informs him he is to be a proctor for the upcoming Chuunin exams. He resents this. His mission load has been light ever since he almost died two years ago, and this would remove from the line of duty for even longer.  
Yuugao tells him to be careful as something is brewing. He listens and realises that maybe this wouldn’t be the easy job he thought it was.

He oversees the preliminary finals and knows that the future of Konohagakure is in good hands. He says so to Yuugao and they bet on the outcome of the finals together.

The Hokage entrusts him with a sensitive mission.  
War is on the horizon.

He fights and dies under the light of the moon. In the end he wasn’t strong enough or quick enough or good enough.  
He doesn’t really want to die. But he does, and it is quick and relatively painless. There are no heroics and no fancy speeches, no dying epiphanies; nothing but the soft luminous glow of the moon as his erstwhile companion says goodbye.

  
In the end he dies because of the sickness present within all humans: mortality.

  
(This is how he dies.)

**Author's Note:**

> The author would like to congratulate you for reading this far.  
> The author would also like your input: did you like it? Hated it? Confused? Please leave a review to let me know.
> 
> Note: edits may occur as more is added to the Fragments Universe to make them all more cohesive. The Author's Note will reflect the date of last edit.


End file.
